Specifically the SLIM SAS ports. I am curious to know if it’s possible to connect one, or two of the linked drives to them while simultaneously using at least two of the PCIe 5.0 NVME slots. I downloaded the manual and as far as I can tell the answer is not in there. I guess it’s my fault for not really knowing what, or how, to connect to the SLIM SAS ports.
The answer is on page A1 (appendix) of the manual.
Looking at the block diagram you can see that the m.2 slots (“PCIe 5.0 NVME slots”) are all directly connected to the CPU, while the slimsas ports are connected to the chipset. Each slimsas port is connected via 4 lanes of PCIe Gen4.
So, to answer your question: yes, you can operate all m.2 ports simultaneously with drives connected to the slimsas ports.
However, if you connect drives to both slimsas ports these will be bottlenecked by the connection from the chipset to the CPU (total of 4 lanes PCIe Gen4). Depending on your use case its possible that it doesn’t matter to you.
If it does you could find a PCIe Gen4 to u.3 adapter (or to slimsas + cables). You’ll likely get away with a cheap one (bifurcation without redrivers) if connected to any of the PCIe slots 5-7 as these have redrivers.
1 Like